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From Granny Catchprice, who runs her family business -- and her family -- with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire -- and himself into an angel -- the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs. But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.

Peter Carey is the author of seven novels including the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda. He has also written a book of short stories (The Fat Man in History) and a children’s book (The Big Bazoohley). Born in Australia in 1943, he has lived in New York City for ten years, with his wife and their two sons.

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Reviews

From Our Editors

Australia’s national treasure Peter Carey, the great mind behind Oscar and Lucinda and Bliss focuses on Granny Catchprice, a cunning old thing who runs her family much like her auto business: with smarts, senility and a nice weighty bag full of explosives. Her daughter is an up-and-coming country singer who knows nothing of selling cars, and son Benny is only 16 but is already an accomplished psychopath. As this eccentric family struggles with the failing business — and each other — a very pregnant tax officer comes calling in The Tax Inspector, another triumphant, if unusual, novel from the Booker Prize-winning author.

Editorial Reviews

"The Tax Inspector is a major work in style and vision...[Carey is] in the prime of his creative life..." -- The Montreal Gazette

"The sheer exuberance and heightened visual power of Mr. Carey's prose is, sentence by sentence, as brilliant and pleasurable as ever, no matter how dark his vision." -- The Globe and Mail